Installation

See Install from USB stick. There is out-of-the-box support for the wired and wireless NICs. There are no special instructions for installation.

Xorg

DPI Settings

In general the autodetected DPI does not fit the smaller resolution very well at all. A good comfortable setting would be 96dpi or 75dpi if you like your fonts really small. An easy way to set your DPI would be to add this to the end of your xserverrc (located in /etc/X11/xinit/).

Graphic Performance

According to the Intel driver documentation, X-Video Motion Compensation or "XvMC" is not enabled by default. Enabling this option can greatly reduce CPU utilization when playing back MPEG-2 video. To enable this option, two things need to be done; first, add this to the device section of your xorg.conf:

Option "XvMC" "true"

Lastly, create a configuration file to tell the X server where the XvMC library is:

The intel-hda-powersave has a side-effect. Short sounds such as IM notifications may not come through, or will be messed up as it starts playing the sound before the sound card wakes up.

Super Hybrid Engine

The eeepc "Super Hybrid Engine" as it is known under Windows has a significant effect on powersaving. This underclocks the FSB for powersave/overclocks for performance and can be controlled via /sys/devices/platform/eeepc/cpufv which is provided by the eeepc_laptop module. The following is a laptop-mode configuration for it that controls it automatically.

Wireless

The rt2860sta wireless has pretty good powersaving, but it is a tradeoff between throughput<->power usage. Minimum power usage gives a pretty low throughput of ~11KB/s when I would normally get >1MB/s.

iwpriv ra0 set PSMode=MAX_PSP

MAX_PSP - maximum power saving

CAM - seems to be normal

FAST_PSP - ? untested, probably a medium value.

acpi-eeepc-generic

Install the acpi-eeepc-genericAUR package from AUR. You must install version 0.9 or greater, as previous versions do not have support for the 1000HE.

Sleep

If you want to use pm-suspend from pm-utils with acpi-eeepc-generic, edit /etc/conf.d/acpi-eeepc-generic.conf to comment out the line

cpufrequtils

To scale the CPU and possibly save a bit of power, you will want to set up CPU frequency scaling. For this you will be using the acpi-cpufreq kernel module. Note that if you have already configured Laptop Mode Tools to set governors, frequencies, etc then you do not need to bother with loading the cpufreq daemon.

Note: lspci for another user produced "Network controller: RaLink RT2860" rather than the Atheros chipset in the output above

WiFi

WiFi should work out of the box with the stock kernel. However, if you do have trouble, you can try switching to the rt2860sta module provided by the rt2860AUR[broken link: archived in aur-mirror] package. If you use the AUR package, you may need to blacklist the rt2800lib and rt2800pci modules.